Over 200 phone calls to Ireland’s two emergency numbers – 112 and 999 – were not answered between 1am and 2.15am last night after a ‘service outage’ affected people trying to contact the emergency services. The service handles calls and texts to 112 and 999 connecting people with gardaí, fire, ambulance or coast guard and air traffic control services for emergencies involving aircraft.
In a statement, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications said it was notified this morning that the Emergency Call Answering Service was “unable to handle” emergency calls over the 75-minute time period.
BT Ireland has a contract with the Government’s Department of Environment, Climate and Communications to deliver the Emergency Call Answering Service, and has now apologised – it said that the problem was attributed to a ‘technical issue’ preventing callers from accessing the emergency service for over an hour.
BT informed the Department that the outage affected approximately 227 callers. All callers impacted by the outage were subsequently followed up with by the Gardaí.
In a statement, a company spokesperson said: “A technical issue prevented callers accessing the Emergency Call Answering Service from 1am to 2.15am on Tuesday 28 June”.
“We quickly restored the service and provided gardaí with the list of callers so that they could call them directly and offer help.”
“We apologise unreservedly to any caller who may have been affected by this service issue,” BT Ireland said.
The Department of Environment, Climate and Communications said that BT Ireland has indicated that the incident resulted from a technical operational issue, which the company soon rectified.
A department spokesperson said: “The cause of the incident is not believed to have been malicious in nature”.
Minister Ossian Smyth, who was briefed on the incident, said the Department has now sought a “detailed and comprehensive report from BTCIL on the incident”. Smyth also said that the Department would establish the precise circumstances that led to the outage, and in subsequent consultation with its legal advisors, would determine the consequences under the contract.
The Department added that its immediate priority was to ensure that there is no risk of a similar occurrence happening in the future.
The contract between BT and the Government to provide the service was signed in February 2018, and is set to expire in November 2025.
In its statement, the Department noted that: “The contract provides a comprehensive set of key performance indicators centred on the availability and quality of the service and BT’s performance against these metrics is closely monitored by the Department, including answering 98% of calls <1.3 seconds”.
The head of the Irish Patients Association, Stephen McMahon, suggested the Minister for Health conduct his own investigation into the issue. He said it was of crucial importance that Ireland had a “robust, secure” system in place, and noted that such an incident held the potential to greatly undermine confidence.
The emergency call answering service dealt with over 2.3 million calls last year.